We All See It: The Neuroscience of Shared Visions

You wake.

The room is dark, warm, and cosy. Against your body, you can feel the reassuring weight of the blanket as it cocoons you. Pulled from your slumber, you relish that familiar feeling of being half-awake, half-asleep.

On instinct, you make a move to check your phone, but something isn’t right.

Your blood runs cold, the feeling of warmth ripped away from you, as you realise you cannot move your arms.

Panic sets in; you try to sit up, but nothing happens. Your muscles are no longer under your control. Trying with all your strength, you cannot move anything but your eyes.

Your heart begins to beat faster; your breathing speeds up. You can feel your chest working harder to push air in and out of your lungs, an automatic process happening on its own. Full of fear, your skin grows damp with sweat, and you feel it seep into the bedsheets.

Frantically, you cast your mind back to your past experiences, but there’s nothing even close to what’s happening now. There’s nothing from your past that can explain why your body isn’t responding to your demands. This is totally new.

In the gloom of your bedroom, you’re frantically sweeping your eyes over the dark shapes, looking for anything that could help you.

Then you see it.

The figure, standing like a sentinel in the corner. Once more, your brain kicks up a gear. All at once, there’s a cascade of thoughts pouring through your already-frazzled brain. Is that a coat hanging on the door handle? Is it a pile of clothes sat on the chair?

None of these things make sense. When you went to bed, there was nothing in the corner.

Before you can think of anything else, the shadow moves. It inches closer and closer as you lie helpless in the bed. The fear you’ve been feeling evolves; it’s beyond anything you could have imagined.

With everything you’ve got, you try to move your arms, kick your legs, do anything that might defend you from whatever it is that’s radiating pure evil. Nothing works. You’re powerless. All you can do is watch as the darkness approaches. In no time at all, it’s looming over your body.

Frantically, you’re telling yourself this is just a bad dream, just a nightmare that will pass soon. Yet as the shadow climbs atop of you, you can feel its weight on your chest as the pressure cuts off your air.

Now you’re choking, you can’t breathe, you’re trying to scream out, to fight back, do anything, but nothing works. The shadow bends down further, inch by inch, until the void that should be its face is all but touching yours.

The fear floods your system, the adrenaline spikes, and you begin to lose consciousness. Your vision wavers, fading in and out, until finally the darkness envelops you.

Nothing.

The alarm rings out. You awake to a bright room, the warm morning sunlight flooding the space.

With your muscles working again, you jump up to look around your bedroom. You check the wardrobe, under the bed, but there’s nothing: the shadow is gone. Not even a pile of clothes or a hanging coat are there to explain what might have happened last night.

It must have been a dream; it had to be.

In an attempt to find answers to what happened, you open your phone and begin searching. In moments, the truth is discovered.

It wasn’t a dream.

This is an experience I’ve (thankfully) only had once in my life.

I woke up confused, terrified, and convinced there was a ghost in the house. After frantically looking online for possible explanations – and heavily considering hiring an exorcist to vanquish the demons – I discovered the answer I was looking for.

It was sleep paralysis, and it’s something that happens to people all over the world.

An Introduction to Sleep Paralysis

Sleep paralysis is surprisingly common.

If you go online and read the stories of those who have experienced this weird quirk of our neurology, you’ll find thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people explaining what they’ve been through. These stories will almost always follow the same theme as the one you’ve just read.

There will be a sense of unease, a loss of bodily control, and some form of entity lurking around the room. There of course exist variations but, by-and-large, they follow the same framework.

Whilst it can be easy to chalk these up to paranormal experiences, they can be easily explained by some essential processes within the brain.

When we sleep, we enter a phase called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. There are a number of reasons why our brains go through REM cycles, each of them playing an essential role in maintaining the health of our mind and body:

• Improved Learning: During REM sleep, the brain prunes its synapses, which is believed to improve memory and problem-solving abilities.

• Mood Regulation: This stage of sleep helps the brain process emotional memories, including ones associated with fear (this is important for sleep paralysis).

• Brain Development: It’s also thought to aid in the development of the central nervous system, which includes the brain and spinal cord. It’s hypothesised that this is one of the reasons why infants, particularly newborns, require so much REM sleep.

One theory suggests that the reason we dream so much during this phase of sleep is because the brain is transferring memories between the hippocampus and neocortex. There isn’t enough research to accurately confirm this theory, however it may explain why we dream so much. Regardless of why this is the case, the reality is that much of our dreaming occurs during REM sleep. So, to counteract this, the brain will temporarily shut down movement during this stage of sleep.

This temporary paralysation stops our bodies from acting out the dreams that are playing in our minds. In a very real sense, the paralysis is a safety precaution, stopping us from thrashing around in our beds as we act out what’s going on in the dream.

However, sometimes this system can misfire. This is what happens during sleep paralysis episodes. Our minds are crossing the threshold between being awake and being asleep, where we’re conscious but still “seeing” the things from our dreams. This is then coupled with the paralysis of our bodies, which is still very much active. The two of those become a horrifying combination, and one that can leave people seriously traumatised.

The causes of sleep paralysis are grounded in reality, and we have empirical data and research that quantifies how and why these episodes occur. When I was frantically Googling at three in the morning after my own experience, the reams of articles on the subject provided much comfort. Knowing that this was just a quirk of our minds was reassuring.

But then I got to thinking about the experience itself. After reading the stories of those thousands of people we’ve already spoken about, it was interesting to see just how many of them experienced the exact same thing.

We can easily accept the idea that our brains misfire and cause us to feel temporarily paralysed, that makes sense. What I found more intriguing was how every story I read – and I mean every one **– reported seeing either: a figure/shadow standing in the corner of the room, a witch/creature sat on their chest, or a doppelgänger lurking beside a bed.

The Night Hag

The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli (1781) is thought to be one of the classic depictions of sleep paralysis perceived as a demonic visitation.

Throughout history, there have been countless accounts of people experiencing the same thing in their sleep. It follows the same framework of modern sleep paralysis accounts (the fear, the paralysation, etc), but with one key difference: instead of a shadow or doppelgänger, people experience the presence of an evil or supernatural being – often termed the Night Hag.

It was so common, in fact, that this is where the word “nightmare” originates. Quite literally being visited by a mare (a term used for a supernatural being in Old English, Polish, Norwegian, Danish, and many more European languages) during the night.

Across the world, folklore tales feature the Night Hag creature with slight variations. There are far too many to explain here, but here are a select few taken from folklore from around the world:

• Türkiye: A supernatural being comes to the victim's room, holds them down hard enough not to allow any kind of movement, and starts to strangle the person.

• Fiji: Referred to as “kana tevoro,” where a demon can be the spirit of a recently dead relative who has come back for some unfinished business or to communicate some important news to the living.

• Albania: Mokthi is believed to be a male spirit with a golden fez hat who appears to women who are usually tired or suffering and stops them from moving.

• China: Here sleep paralysis is widely known as "鬼壓身/鬼压身" (pinyin: guǐ yā shēn) which literally translates into "ghost pressing on body" or "ghost pressing on bed."

• Vietnam: Sleep paralysis is referred to as “ma đè” and “bóng đè,” meaning "held down by a ghost," and "held down by a shadow,” respectively.

• Sri Lanka (and Tamil culture more widely): This phenomenon is referred to as “Amuku Be” meaning "the ghost that forces one down."

• Egypt: Here the phenomenon is known as “Kaboos (كابوس)”, literally meaning “Compressor,” and is widely attributed to djinn who might be doing it out of malevolence, mischief, or simply by accident.

The above examples are just scratching the surface of the various forms of sleep paralysis demons that cultures across the world experience.

What I find truly interesting is that regardless of culture, location, race, country, or anything else, people across the world and throughout history have been reporting the exact same phenomena – namely, a creature visiting them during the night and pressing down upon (or otherwise paralysing) them.

There are a number of theories attempting to explain why this is the case, with one being that we simply experience the things that are most frightening to us. This may suggest why we see creatures in the corner, as it could be the personification of the fear of seeing an intruder break into our homes (a place that’s supposed to be our safe space) and us then being powerless to do anything about it.

There have been stories of people seeing giant spiders during sleep paralysis, but given that arachnophobia is the most common fear on earth, and if sleep paralysis really is just our minds showing us our worst fears, surely we’d expect to see spiders more often? As far as I know, there are no folktales about a big spider crawling across your chest at night.

But what if it’s not a personification of our fears, and we really are all seeing the same thing? Could that even be possible? Surely there’s no scientific grounding for that, right?

Right…?

Hallucinogens and Shared Visions

My first experience with hallucinogenics was in my early twenties.

As a teenager, a group of friends and myself would spend most of our weekends getting black-out drunk. We’d load up the Xbox (and sometimes chess, of all things), drink until we couldn’t drink any more, and invariably wake up the next day regretting it all.

Soon this interest in alcohol would shift to weed, and then psychedelics, but it wouldn’t be until years later that I got my hands on some.

By the time I tried mushrooms, the original friend group had dissolved (which my liver was thankful for) but my interest in psychedelics remained. The first trip I had was with another friend who, too, was interested in exploring things that society would consider “taboo,” and one of them was psychedelics.

We sat in his living room watching the mushrooms float in a small jug of hot water. Before long, he strained out the plant matter and decanted the tea into two cups. With some ambient music on in the background (the most cliché of clichés), we drank the tea and let the mushrooms do their thing.

My first experience was, I think, fairly standard. The visions began first, nothing on the scale of DMT visions (which we’ll explore shortly), but rather a pulsing sensation, as though the physical objects around me were breathing. After this came a sense of dissolving, as though my body was melting into the physical surroundings. And finally, it ended with a sense of connection, as though this experience was the true reality of the world, and we live our “regular” lives disconnected from this fundamental reality.

Above and beyond the experience itself, I left my first trip interested in what these substances could unlock, what they could be used to achieve and explore. For a time, too, it led me to be interested in tie-dye shirts.

The interest in psychedelics soon found me looking into DMT, which is where the idea of shared visions come into play.

Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), is a naturally-occurring psychedelic compound that can be found in a wide variety of places, including plants, animals, and even in our own bodies – within the cerebrospinal fluid, for those interested. Sometimes referred to as the Spirit Molecule, DMT plays a key part in our story of shared experiences.

Historically, some indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin (Peru, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador), have used DMT (via a brew called Ayahuasca) for ritualistic purposes. The reasons for this vary, ranging from divination (accessing hidden information), to healing (both physical and spiritual). For our purposes, however, I’m focusing on another reason these indigenous peoples make use of DMT: communicating with spirits and ancestors.

As with many things, it didn’t take long for the Western world to hijack the traditions of these indigenous peoples, making use of Ayahuasca to enter this sacred realm. Without probing too deeply into the ethical aspects of this, we find something quite interesting. There exists now Ayahuasca retreats where people pay to take part in ceremonies with these indigenous peoples, and experience the communion with the spirit realm.

For many who ingest Ayahuasca, they report encountering so-called “machine elves,” which are often described as jesters, aliens, and/or geometric entities. They’re said to be intelligent, not just being a random shape or shadow. Additionally, those who’ve interacted with them say they act independently of the experiencer, with their own agenda and volition.

Now to make it totally clear, I don’t necessarily think that these substances allow us humans to interact with literal beings outside our usual realm of experience, however I do think there’s something fascinating about the shared experiences that are reported.

There are several suggested reasons as to why those who’ve taken DMT seem to experience the same things. The most compelling, I think, is the argument that when our systems are flooded with serotonergic compounds, we default to an underlying, hardwired set of archetypal patterns that are buried deep within our minds.

Carl Jung, the legendary Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist, explored this idea in great depth, finally landing on the concept of the Collective Unconscious.

And that’s where we’re heading next.

Hardwired Archetypes and Iconography

Jung explored the concept of the Collective Unconscious in many of his writings, but it all culminated with the publication of The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious in 1959. In this book, he put forward the same idea that we’ve just been discussing.

Namely, that there’s an underlying set of imagery and archetypes buried deep within us all.

The archetypes are many, and have gone onto inspire countless other areas and industries, from marketing and storytelling to political and cultural movements. Whilst to fully explore each of the architypes in detail would bloat this essay beyond what’s feasible, we can skim the surface to get an understanding of what they are and how they work.

Jung broke the archetypes down into two groups: the primary structural archetypes, and then the character archetypes. Whilst we’re not going to explore them all, there are two archetypes we should focus on in particular:

• The Shadow (Structural): Everything that we refuse to acknowledge within our lives, including weakness, aggression, sexuality, shameful impulses, and beyond. Jung argues that “integrating” the shadow, which is the process of embracing your “dark” side is essential to psychological health. When unintegrated, it gets projected onto other people or erupts destructively. If you’ve ever heard the term “shadow work,” this is the part of the psyche we’re trying to align.

• The Trickster (Character): Boundary-crossing, rule-breaking, paradoxical. Neither good nor evil, but transformative through disruption. In culture and mythology, the Trickster’s influence can be found in Loki, Coyote, Hermes, the court jester, and more.

The archetypes can essentially be seen as the fundamental building blocks on which everything we know about the world is built on. Jung argues, for example, they’re the reason why cultures across the world will have similar folktales and mythology despite never coming into contact with one another.

So far we’ve looked at folklore, but if we’re to accept Jung’s idea of a Collective Unconscious, then we must also look at modern mythology too. Across the major religions of today, the same themes repeat over and over. For example, the story of the Flood.

Taking the Christian version of the story, Noah is told by God that there’s to be a great flood that will wipe out life on earth, and he’s to build an arc that’ll act as a raft for the lucky creatures who manage to secure a space. We’re all told this story as kids, and it sits right at the start of the Bible – Genesis 7:1.

And yet, this same story appears in countless other forms of mythology. We have Utnapishtim from the Epic of Gilgamesh (predating Genesis by some 1000 years), Manu from the Hindu tradition, Deucalion from ancient Greek mythology, and many, many more examples of the Flood story being told across cultures and time periods.

If we’re to look at the Flood myth from a Jungian perspective, it very much aligns with the archetypes we’ve already discussed. Consider:

The corrupt world (the Self) must be purged, and as the flood (the Unconscious) washes over it, only the ark (the aspects of the Self that have been integrated) survives, emerging into a new world (the rebuilt Ego) that’s free to flourish.

Jung would theorise that the Flood myth appears over and over because it's encoding a universal psychological experience. Namely, the terrifying, but necessary, flooding of the Ego by unconscious material. Every human psyche faces this in some form, and every culture therefore independently arrives at the same symbolic narrative to contain and transmit that experience.

A Tricky Pill to Swallow

It can be a little tricky to get our heads around the idea of us all being hardwired with the same set of imagery and archetypes within our minds.

This struggle is what sits at the core of Jung’s psychology, an understanding that these archetypes exist both in our minds and somewhere we’re unable to access. He neither fully collapsed archetypes into just brain activity, nor did he claim they were straightforwardly external, supernatural entities (in the case of DMT trips or sleep paralysis episodes).

Instead, he labelled them as psychoid archetypes. Essentially, this is his name for archetypes that exist at the very deepest, most fundamental level of our psyches, in a domain that’s not purely psychological or purely physical. This can be thought of as a layer of reality that underlies both mind and matter, and something from which everything else stems.

When we think of ourselves, we like to believe we’re free agents, building our personalities from the ground up. It can be difficult to accept the idea that, buried deep within us, is a hardwired set of imagery we pull from as we go about our lives.

But why could this not be the case?

Consider the humble bee. It’s born and gets straight to work, having no need to go to Bee School to learn the importance of collecting pollen. It just does it. This is instinct, and it exists in every creature across the animal kingdom. The lion’s instinct is to hunt; the spider’s instinct is to build a web. The processes and behaviours of animals are so intricate, so detailed, and in many cases, so bizarre, that without instinct, they’d never come into being.

And in the same way these instinctual, hardwired behaviours exist within animals, we too have a hardwired element to us. The difference is that whilst the instincts between animals is behavioural, the instinct within humans is more imaginal.

Where the bee, with its pollen collecting or waggle dancing, has behavioural instincts that are rigid and predefined, our instincts are more akin to loose templates. The same archetypes are at the foundation, but these foundations then get given different facades and paintjobs. The Trickster archetype, for example, is the same fundamental joker who enjoys shenanigans, but in Norse mythology he’s called Loki, in Native American traditions he’s called Coyote, in Islamic religion it can be called a Jinn, or it can even be a “machine elf” when you’re under the influence of DMT.

Jung also worked a lot on dreams in general. He theorised that the things we see in dreams hold deeper meanings than just a little story that our brains tell us when we sleep. To him, the imagery we see during sleep (often REM sleep, as we’ve discussed) is too linked to the Collective Unconscious. And this would make sense, if we’re to accept the idea of underlying concepts rooted deep in our brains.

There are whole books out there, entire documentaries, and even people who have made careers from interpreting dreams. And when you explore the subject, you find that – much like our sleep paralysis episodes and DMT trips – the same themes and patterns recur time and time again.

People regularly report dreams of losing teeth, of finding new rooms in their homes, of falling, dying, failing a test, and so on. Of course, many of these can be attributed to common anxieties we face in our day to day lives, but there are other, more specific dreams that don’t seem to be attached to anything in the physical world.

A dream I often had as a child (and an image I can still conjure up if I try hard enough) is that of a small, white sphere sat in a black space. It’ll start tiny, and then minute by minute, it’ll eventually grow large, to the point where I can conceive of nothing other than the sphere. Each time this dream occurred, the younger me would wake up in a puddle of sweat and wracked with fear. When I looked into this dream recently, I discovered that plenty of other people have had the exact same experience.

That dream doesn’t conform to a basic anxiety (teeth falling out, missing the bus, etc), but rather hints at some intrinsic, underlying imagery that’s conjured up when our brains enter a dream state. We have no basis in nature or evolution to be scared of large white spheres, so why does this imagery seem to occur within the dreams of different people who have never come into contact with one another?

Jung would argue that it’s the Collective Unconscious materialising in our dreams.

Conclusion

I opened this essay with a moment of fear.

Not in an abstract, philosophical sense, but genuinely, viscerally scared. Lying paralysed in the dark, watching something that had no business existing move toward me across the bedroom floor. Whatever rational framework I thought I was in possession of (the one that saw me confidently say I didn’t believe in ghosts) dissolved completely in those few seconds. I was just a person, terrified, alone, and utterly powerless.

What I didn't expect was that looking for an explanation would lead me here: to Amazonian shamans, to machine elves, to a Swiss psychiatrist who spent his career insisting that the deepest parts of our minds are not entirely our own.

The neuroscience of sleep paralysis is, as we've seen, well-documented and relatively straightforward. The misfiring of the REM system, the paralysis bleeding into wakefulness, that part made sense quickly, and it helped as I lay there in bed with the adrenaline and fear still at work in my system. But it didn't explain the figure in the corner. It didn't explain why a farmer in medieval England, a fisherman in Fiji, and someone doom-scrolling Reddit at 3am in Manchester are all describing, with uncomfortable precision, the same dark shape pressing down on their chest.

That's the part I couldn’t shake.

Do I think Jung was right in every detail? Probably not. His work sits at the edge of what's empirically verifiable, and he knew that. I do think, however, that he was pointing to something real. The idea that beneath our individual personalities, our cultures, our languages and mythologies, there's a shared substrate – a set of patterns so fundamental they predate all of it – is one I'd have dismissed outright before I started researching this. Now it feels less like mysticism and more like the most reasonable explanation on the table.

And honestly? I find that comforting in a way I didn't quite anticipate.

We talk a lot about what divides us. It's hard not to, when the evidence for division is so loud and so constant. But if Jung is even partially right, then somewhere beneath all of it (beneath the arguments, the borders, the ideologies) we're all drawing from the same well. The stranger you passed this morning without making eye contact with shares the same archetypal architecture as you. The same shadows live in both of you.

We started with a demon in a dark room. We ended up, somehow, with a reason to feel less alone.

I think that's worth losing a night's sleep over.